Whom did Rubio think he was fooling when he said that his bill is not amnesty because it requires enforcement first, and because it doesn’t immediately give citizenship? Was he born yesterday? Is he not aware of how many previous amnesty proposals were said by their supporters not to be amnesty because they required enforcement first (a patently fraudulent statement) and didn’t give citizenship, and how they were all rejected because conservatives saw through these obvious lies? Amnesty does not mean giving citizenship to illegals, it means legalizing illegals. The only definite thing accomplished by Rubio’s proposal is that this supposed Great Conservative Hispanic Hope has discredited himself with conservatives by turning into as big and as transparent a liar as John McCain, who himself is the worst man in America.

However, Rubio had already discredited himself with me. In May 2012 I wrote:

I’m staggered. A U.S. senator making remarks on national policy in the nation’s capital, and then immediately giving the same remarks in Spanish, as though this were bi-lingual Canada, where politicians make all their public statements in both English and French.

This totally alters my view of Rubio. It doesn’t matter if he’s good on some things. He stands for the Hispanicization of the United States. He stands for the idea that Spanish is a public language of this country, a language in which our politics is conducted along with English. His selection as vice presidential nominee is a deal killer. A Republican party that nominates this man for national office has lost any claim to be standing for America.

Here is the video. The sudden switch to Spanish occurs at about 1:38.

Comments

Ed H. writes:

Keep in mind the context. Rubio is not just speaking another language. He is speaking Spanish while delivering a piece of legislation that will give citizenship to millions of Hispanics illegals, and in effect make them the cultural majority of the USA. [LA replies: If you look at the video he is speaking of some other issue, I think health care. The point is that in giving a statement on a national political issue he gave it in English then immediately gave it in Spanish. So presumably he does this habitually, including with statements on immigration.] He is doing all this while running as a stealth candidate for the Presidency. Never in one place has the true meaning of “multiculturalism” come together so visibly. “Multiculturalism” is nothing but a front for a racial power play benefiting one racial group over another. Rubio’s vision for America consists of the end of America. The end of its culture, history, language, and cohesion all under the guise of “inclusion.” But while Rubio may not be American, he just cannot help being very Latin American. Because that’s what he is. Whether Juan Peron or Fidel, or Cardenas the path to Latin American power has always been for lighter skinned creole class to distribute or, promise to distribute, goodies to a dependency class of slightly more stupid, slightly more dark skinned peons who will vote slavishly in return for a fatherly nod, a bit of populist rhetoric and another handout. After 500 years of Latino failure it is often hard to come up with enough goodies to pass around. But in America the dismantling and distribution of 12 generations of white European achievement should keep the new Rubio-class of caudillos in power for quite a while. [LA replies: has anyone ever met or seen a Cuban-American who did NOT primarily identify with Hispanics rather than with the historic USA and its majority culture? I don’t remember seeing one. Though Cuban Republicans are Caucasian, they identify more with the great nonwhite Hispanic masses than with white Americans.]

“Look, as soon as you give these people a legal status, to say that you’re going to reverse that is ridiculous,” Vitter said. “It’ll never happen. Soon as you give them a legal status, they are here legally forever and probably they’re citizens pretty darn soon thereafter. And if Marco thinks what happens or doesn’t happen on the enforcement side—that’s not going to happen. I just think he’s nuts.”

Stephen T. writes:

You write: “Amnesty does not mean giving citizenship to illegals, it means legalizing illegals.”

Thank you for making that important distinction. [LA replies: That’s like thanking me for saying that two plus two equals four. But in a society in which our leaders, including many Republicans, keep insisting that two plus two equals five, it’s necessary.] I can only add this, which I feel the urge to mention at intervals: Most illegal aliens of Mestizo Mexican origin have no interest in American citizenship, never have, never will, and wouldn’t bother to fill out the papers to apply for it even if they were pre-approved and personally delivered to them. What they are interested in is remaining Mexicans who can come and go from this country at will by the millions and without regard to any law or control. This arrangement conforms more comfortably to the Mexican mentality on most issues: An anything-goes, gray area in which nothing is specifically allowed nor prohibited and, at any rate, there’s no effective enforcement to worry about, anyway. Obama’s “Path To Citizenship” sounds sort of European and orderly, and probably raises the specter of having next to submit to automobile safety inspections, noise and graffiti ordinances and leash laws. I actually believe the current “broken immigration system” we hear so much about has endured as long as it has precisely because Mexicans innately adapt and thrive so well in “broken systems” in general.

Prediction: upon the granting of amnesty, most Mestizo Mexicans will simply remain in this country and exploit the end of immigration enforcement that accompanies amnesty, without making any effort to avail themselves of American citizenship. When this becomes clear in a few years, it will be followed by some urgent American program to summarily declare any Mexican this side of the border a de facto American citizen—or at least qualified to major benefits like voting—simply by virtue of the fact that they are here, whether or not they apply for it. “We can’t allow people living among us to remain in the shadows,” etc.

Henry McCulloch writes:

Mr. Auster has scored a direct hit in dubbing Marco Rubio the “Hispanic John McCain.” The description neatly captures: (i) the essential mendacity of Rubio, a key McCain trait our young Cuban senator evidently shares; (ii) the McCain-like hint of unbalance just below Rubio’s surface, reflected in the radical unreality of his amnesty proposal; and (iii) the fact that Rubio has now made it perfectly clear that he is a Latin American (Cuban) first and an Estadounidense—as Latin Americans call Americans to deny that the United States has any monopoly on the name “American”—a distant second if at all. And, added bonus, it also captures Rubio’s friendship with the creepy Lindsey Graham, a McCain crony from way back.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I was on to Marco Rubio about as soon as Mr. Auster was. And the longer Rubio was in the Senate the more my suspicions were confirmed by his patent willingness to support illegal-alien amnesties, although Rubio has always denied—just as he does with the current proposal—that they are in fact amnesties.

In July 2012, when the Republican Party was suffering one of its recurring diversity swoons and the GOP’s manipulators were floating the idea of Rubio as Mitt Romney’s running mate, I wrote an essay about Rubio that VDare.com published in two parts. In the first part I argued that Rubio would be a bad VP pick because he is ineligible to the office of president, and therefore ineligible for the vice-presidency. In the second part I argued that Rubio would be a bad VP pick because he is disloyal to the United States—the country that gave his family asylum from Cuba’s Communist regime, ultimately gave the Rubio clan U.S. citizenship, and in which Rubios have prospered safely ever since.

Based on Rubio’s proposal in the Senate of another nightmarishly mis-named “DREAM Act” designed to give amnesty and American benefits to a deliberately under-defined set of illegal aliens, I believed that if he should become vice president, Rubio would quickly become the most vocal and prominent Republican advocate of an essentially unrestricted and unending amnesty for illegal aliens, and that he would do so as an Hispanic special-pleader. So it has proved, although Rubio didn’t need to leave the Senate to take on the role. Should the Republican Party adopt the amnesty proposed by the Senate’s infamous “Gang of Eight”—of whom Rubio is the public face—it will be committing political seppuku, although that poor excuse for a political party’s poor excuses for leaders seem blissfully unaware of their political fate should tens of millions more statist Third-Worlders start voting in American elections. Rubio is well aware of the potential consequences, and plainly would not mind them. (The same is true of the Bush clan, now planning to re-enter politics with a new generation of “Latino” Bushes.) Republicans love to think of Cubans as “their” Hispanics. But when the hated Fidel Castro dies and the last vestige of the Cold War dynamic that drew Cubans to the GOP is gone, how likely are many Cubans to keep voting Republican? If his amnesty proposal is enacted in some form and the Latin-Americanizing of America accelerates, I fully expect the ambitious Rubio will join the Democratic Party within six months of Castro’s death.

One weapon conservatives should use against Marco Rubio—although I doubt they will, as they are unwilling to use it even against Barack Hussein Obama—is the question of his eligibility. I go through it at greater length in the linked essay, but in short Rubio is ineligible for the presidency because he is not a “natural born Citizen” as the Constitution explicitly requires. Rubio was born to two Cuban nationals; their subsequent naturalization is legally irrelevant. Because he is ineligible for the presidency, the Constitution also states explicitly that he is ineligible for the vice-presidency. Ineligibility is an argument American conservatives should make to prevent this Latin American agent of influence“s rising any higher in our political system. [LA replies: I disagree with Mr. Sutherland on this point. The criterion for natural born citizen that he promotes has never been established nor practiced under U.S. law. It’s a fantasy that any official body in the U.S. would find that Rubio, born of two parents who were legally in the U.S. but not citizens, is not qualified for the presidency. But I don’t want to get into that issue again. I’m simply registering my disagreement, and will let it go at that.]

In my VDare essay, however, I was howlingly wrong about one thing. Here is my last paragraph:

The GOP should have learned from the second President Bush’s two rejected attempts to pass illegal alien amnesties that to be an amnesty advocate is a sure loser nationally for Republicans. Probably even John McCain realizes that by now.

I should have known better!

Harry Savannah writes:

Can anyone conjecture, theorize, or otherwise explain why white Hispanics (or whites with Spanish surnames) are in favor of Hispanicizing, destroying the traditional America contra other whites with more typically European names (western or eastern)? Yes, there are as always exceptions. Is there any public or noted Spanish sur-named individual that is a true immigration patriot that anyone reading VFR is aware of?

LA replies:

1. Simple. Their Spanish surname and Hispanic background give them the Hispanic identity, and that identity transcends all else.

2. I’m sure there must be some, but off hand I am not aware of one.

I think there are some VFR readers of Hispanic or partly Hispanic background who are immigration patriots, but they are not public or noted individuals. Also, as I remember, none of them has a Spanish surname.

LA writes:

To return to the start of this entry, I cannot find words to express what a despicable phony Rubio is.

Will a single conservative immigration patriot continue to like him after this? If the world were rational, by this flagrantly dishonest amnesty proposal he would have destroyed his future in the conservative movement.

Paul K. writes:

I agree with your description of Marco Rubio as the “Hispanic John McCain” when it comes to the immigration issue, but the two men are dissimilar in persona. McCain comes across as a cranky, somewhat deranged old man, while Rubio comes across as an earnest schoolboy: not fully formed, eager to please, and of no well-informed opinions or strong convictions. He looks like a more suitable candidate for student council president than president of the United States.

If he ran against Hillary in 2016 she would make mincemeat of him.

LA replies:

His persona as earnest young man is now exposed as a total lie. The man is as false and dishonest as anyone can be. That’s why I call him the Hispanic John McCain: not just because he has the same position on immigration as McCain, but because he is as dishonest as McCain.

Bob writes:

Thank you for your writings—they have played a very important role in my personal transformation from a garden-variety neoconservative to a traditionalist conservative—and I pray for your health.

In the post entitled “The Hispanic John McCain,” a discussion arises over whether there are any prominent Americans of Cuban descent who are immigration patriots. I’d like to point you to Harvard labor economist George Borjas (born Jorge Jesus Borjas). He is probably the most prominent academic supporter of immigration restriction (i.e. he has been vocal about the need to reduce legal immigration rates). His work on the subject is definitely worth reading.

I actually came upon him through VFR—if I recall correctly, he was the thesis adviser at Harvard for Jason Richwine, now of the Heritage Foundation, who wrote his thesis about the connection between immigration and IQ.

Further, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas (Anglo mother, Cuban father) has so far held the line against the latest Rubio-Schumer-McCain-Durbin amnesty effort. His opposition hasn’t exactly been on par with the heroic efforts of Sen. Jeff Sessions the last time this debate came up, but it is valuable. Interestingly, when he was running in the GOP primary last year, his establishment rival David Dewhurst demanded a debate in Spanish (I wish I was making this up), and Cruz rejected this.

Bill Carpenter writes:

Rubio is a harbinger of Jeb.

By which I mean that by profiting from Republican fears of liberal media and Hispanic voters, Rubio and his friends would like to create a pro-Hispanic force in the Republican party to prepare the way for the ultimate pro-Hispanic, Jeb Bush.

Daniel F. writes:

Was there ever any reason to take Rubio seriously? He’s a typical young and shallow political hack on the make, who, because of his ethnicity and presentability (and fluency in reading speeches—quite an accomplishment for a Republican politician), was cultivated and promoted to unearned national prominence by the “conservative” establishment. He says whatever his funders and consultants tell him to say. He is the creature of the business lobbies, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the Weekly Standard and those Wall Street bankers and hedge-fund managers who fund the remnants of the neo-conservative enterprise.

Affluent “white” Hispanics have good reason to identify with Spanish-speaking immigrants—membership in a favored minority group is a great career-booster, in business and the professions as much as in politics and government.

LA replies:

But it wasn’t just the GOP and neocon establishment that made a big deal of Rubio. He has been hugely popular with the tea parties.

In any case, even for people who felt that Rubio had something to offer conservatism, he is now thoroughly exposed as a fake, phony, and fraud.

Daniel F. replies:

To reply to your response, I sympathize with the Tea Party movement, but I don’t think their judgment of political leaders is particularly reliable. Also, I think the Tea Partiers avoided issues like immigration, so Rubio’s popularity with the Tea Party said nothing about his stand on immigration one way or the other. I would add that Rubio was fairly prominent before the Tea Party came into existence; he became Speaker of the Florida House in 2007.

LA replies:

In mentioning the tea parties, my only intention was to counter your point that Rubio is an establishment-created figure. The points you bring up are not relevant to that issue.

February 1

Richard K. writes:

This comment of yours made me laugh out loud:

In any case, even for people who felt that Rubio had something to offer conservatism, he is now thoroughly exposed as a fake, phony, and fraud.

I laughed because whenever I hear “fake, phony, and fraud,” I think … Bob Grant.

I used to listen to Grant many, many years ago during my truck driving days. I was a young, dopey liberal, but was drawn to him, and later, got closer and closer to his outlook.